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"Cashmere shawls History."
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“Designed for eternity”: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain
Zutshi focuses on the narratives on Kashmiri shawls that were produced primarily in the metropole during the mid-Victorian moment when commodity culture was at its height and empire, in general, but India, in particular, was on the minds of Britons. She demonstrates that the discourse surrounding shawls was about far more than simply the consumption of an exotic commodity from the East and the production of British imitations. She argues that Victorian material culture--particularly, the consumption, production, and circulation of Kashmiri shawls--is an ideal vehicle in understanding not only how empire might have been interjected into the lives of ordinary Victorians but also how they actively interacted with the idea of empire. Far from appearing as a nebulous entity situated in distant lands, the constituent parts of empire were readily identifiable in these narratives as, for instance, Kashmir--a distinct, exceptional place on the frontiers of the British empire. Furthermore, Zutshi argues that the idea of empire itself, as mediated through its commodities, was a fluid category that could be deployed for various different purposes in Victorian public culture.
Journal Article
Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500-2000
Kashmiri shawls serve as a material vector to trace how European assumptions of geographical determinism, racial hierarchy, and gender essentialism underpinned the seemingly disparate nineteenth-century narratives about design history and various theories about an \"Asiatic mode of production\" in labor history. The continuing strength of these assumptions is demonstrated by the contemporary marketing in 2001 of pashmina (\"woven goat hair\" or cashmere) shawls, using the recycled tropes of exoticism and fantasy ethnography crafted during the heyday of British colonialism.
Journal Article
KASHMIR SHAWLS IN MID-VICTORIAN NOVELS
WHEN CLOTH OR CLOTHING made for a specific purpose in one cultural context begins to be produced as a commodity and is appropriated as fashion by a different culture, meanings reverberate on both sides of the transaction. The commercial traffic with India in the nineteenth century brought many such commodities into the homes of the English middle class. Some of these items, and particularly textiles, led a double life, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. If mid-Victorian novels may be said to have assisted in circulating and crystallizing, rather than merely reflecting, social norms among their readers, then the regularity with which certain Indian textiles and especially shawls reappear in these novels bespeaks their burgeoning importance both commercially and ideologically.
Journal Article
Prologue
In nineteenth-century France, modernity often operated precisely through what was most easily dismissed—the seemingly negligible fashion accessories of women. A cashmere shawl might obliquely refer to imperial conquest in Algeria but openly indicate married status in Parisian society. A silk parasol could whisper racial and cultural supremacy but loudly proclaim the delicacy of the fair sex. A painted fan might conceal aesthetic and social inauthenticity but also reveal the uncontested power of social status buttressed by wealth. Because of its trivialized status, the feminine fashion accessory could accomplish ideological work imperceptibly, both avowing and disavowing its connection to some
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